Death is encountered in meditation and death is encountered in sexual orgasm. But if you can encounter these deaths, you will become capable of encountering the ultimate death: the death of the body – and without fear. Once you know that you can lose yourself and yet can be, once you know that losing is not really losing but gaining, once you know that merging is not death but life eternal – once you have known it, there is no death for you. Your body will die, everything that you have will die, but you – the very being, the very ground of your existence – are eternal.

And it is good: if you can experience death in sex, sex itself becomes spiritual, it becomes a meditation. Once you can know it with the outer woman or outer man, with the beloved or the lover, it will be easy for you to move into meditation and create the same phenomenon within that you have known without.

But one can also create it directly in the inner realm. It will be difficult, but it can be created. Once it is created and you have known a deep meeting, a deep communion within your own two polar opposites, outward sex will disappear. Sex without is just a substitute for this sex within. And meditation, I call sex within. You are alone, in a deep orgasm with your own polar opposite.

Wherever you can feel death, feel it. Don’t escape. Death is beautiful, death is the greatest mystery, more mysterious than life. Through life you can gain the world, the futile world – meaningless, worthless. Through death you can gain the eternal. Death is the door.

Socrates was dying – poison had been given to him. His face seemed ecstatic, so his friends asked him, “Socrates, you are going to die within moments. Why are you looking so happy, so blissful? We have never seen anyone dying with such a blissful face, with such ecstatic eyes. What is the matter? What is happening to you?”

Socrates said, “I am entering death, the great mystery. Life is nothing before it. The unknown is opening before me, the unlimited, the uncharted. I am on a great voyage. I am losing myself, but gaining the whole universe, the whole existence.”

Don’t be afraid of death. The fear of death debars you from all deep experiences: of love, of meditation, of ecstasy. Once you are afraid of death, you are debarred from all deep experiences.

Be ready to die, and then life, eternal life, will be yours.

Jesus says: “Whosoever tries to save himself will lose himself. And whosoever is ready to lose himself will attain himself.”